A Korean Visitor Rekindles Memories in Flushing

The Dodgers’ Hyun-Jin Ryu, pitching against the Mets on Thursday, is the 14th Korean to play in the majors.

Barton Silverman / The New York Times

April 26, 2013

On Baseball

By ANDREW KEH

My older sister and I were born at Flushing Hospital in Queens, even though it was a 40-minute drive from my parents’ Westchester County home. This week, I text-messaged some Korean-American friends from the New York area, wondering how many were born at that hospital, too. “We all were,” one wrote back.

Flushing, for us, has always maintained a certain unshakable pull. Large numbers of Asian immigrant families, of course, began residing there in the 1960s, when exclusionary immigration quotas were loosened in the United States. My family merely lived nearby.

I remember spending countless nights inside my family’s purple station wagon while my dad zigzagged a path between Northern and Kissena boulevards in Flushing. We bought groceries at Sambok market. We went to a Korean-Chinese restaurant called Sam Won Gahk, still there today, for noodles. Before dinner, we would get haircuts on Roosevelt Avenue.

And sometimes we went into Flushing to watch the Mets play. Chan Ho Park, a pitcher from Konkju, South Korea, joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in the mid-1990s, becoming the first Korean in the majors and soon a star. It felt imperative that we travel to Shea Stadium when the Dodgers were in town so we could see Park pitch. And because New York City has America’s second-largest Korean population, after Los Angeles, many people shared our impulse.

In those games, I watched fans in the crowd as much as I watched the players on the field. People waved Korean flags and chanted, “Park Chan Ho,” the three syllables of his name aligning perfectly with “Let’s go, Mets!” and often drowning it out. That left some non-Korean Mets fans understandably perturbed. This week, one friend texted to me a distinct recollection of seeing pieces of kimbap — rice rolled inside seaweed — flung across the stands during one confrontation among fans.

Chan Ho Park, the first Korean player in the major leagues, at the Dodgers’ season opener in 1994.

Agence France-Presse

Hyun-Jin Ryu, a 26-year-old Dodgers rookie this season, a Korean roughly my age, saw those games, too. Growing up around Incheon, South Korea, he watched broadcasts of Park’s Dodger outings in the middle of the night, or at dawn. His memories are as vivid and fond as mine.

“It wasn’t just me,” Ryu said, sitting inside the visitors’ dugout at Citi Field this week, as the Dodgers played a three-game series against the Mets. “Everyone in Korea who was around my age or the same age as me, we all were inspired by him and watched almost every game.”

Park was a pioneer; Ryu is not. But on Thursday afternoon, when Ryu took the mound at Citi Field, the sights and sounds were very much as they were way back then.

Hundreds of Korean fans, some of them carrying flags and banners, cheered for the visiting team. Kimbap was pulled from plastic shopping bags. My mother texted me before the game from a hair salon — the women there had been talking about Ryu, too.

Over the years, the Mets have had Korean players on their roster, including Park, who pitched one game for them in 2007, when he was well beyond his prime. Before Park, the Mets had the left-hander Dae-Sung Koo in 2005; he was best known for his only major league hit, a double that he somehow slammed off the Yankees’ Randy Johnson. And before Koo, the Mets had the right-hander Jae Weong Seo, who pitched decently at times from 2002 to 2005.

Fans who came to cheer on Ryu at Citi Field.

Barton Silverman / The New York Times

Ryu became the 14th Korean to make it to the majors when he signed with the Dodgers this winter. In South Korea, he led the league in strikeouts for five of his seven seasons. Because of his track record, because of the money the Dodgers spent on him, there are immediate expectations for him to do well here.

His easygoing personality has helped. Lon Rosen, the Dodgers’ executive vice president and chief marketing officer, joked that one of the first English phrases Ryu learned was “Hi, Stan,” which endeared him to Stan Kasten, the team president.

Ryu has also benefited from living in Los Angeles, which he said was like being in South Korea because of the large Korean population there.

But when I mentioned to him that Park sometimes said representing a whole nation each time he pitched for the Dodgers was draining, Ryu agreed that he felt significant pressure. “I know every pair of eyes is watching every pitch that I throw,” he said.

Everyone was watching when Park pitched, too, and those memories resurfaced during Thursday’s game.

During the eighth inning, the scoreboard at Citi Field pulsated with a graphic and a drum beat: “Let’s Go Mets!” But quickly, a different chant — a trisyllabic Korean name, Ryu Hyun Jin — burst through the din, the same way it happened at Shea Stadium almost two decades ago. It was a familiar tension, special to Flushing.